Stephen E. Ambrose – Bickerstaff Booksellers

Band of Brothers

Kim — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:16:45 +0000

As good a rifle company as any in the world, Easy Company, 506th Airborne Division, U.S. Army, kept getting the tough assignments — responsible for everything from parachuting into France early D-Day morning to the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. In Band of Brothers, Ambrose tells of the men in this brave unit who fought, went hungry, froze, and died, a company that took 150 percent casualties and considered the Purple Heart a badge of office. Drawing on hours of interviews with survivors as well as the soldiers’ journals and letters, Stephen Ambrose recounts the stories, often in the men’s own words, of these American heroes.

The Wild Blue

Kim — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:16:41 +0000

Stephen Ambrose is the acknowledged dean of the historians of World War II in Europe. In three highly acclaimed, bestselling volumes, he has told the story of the bravery, steadfastness, and ingenuity of the ordinary young men, the citizen soldiers, who fought the enemy to a standstill — the band of brothers who endured together. The very young men who flew the B-24s over Germany in World War II against terrible odds were yet another exceptional band of brothers, and, in “The Wild Blue,” Ambrose recounts their extraordinary brand of heroism, skill, daring, and comradeship with the same vivid detail and affection. Ambrose describes how the Army Air Forces recruited, trained, and then chose those few who would undertake the most demanding and dangerous jobs in the war. These are the boys — turned pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners of the B-24s — who suffered over 50 percent casualties. With his remarkable gift for bringing alive the action and tension of combat, Ambrose carries us along in the crowded, uncomfortable, and dangerous B-24s as their crews fought to the death through thick black smoke and deadly flak to reach their targets and destroy the German war machine. Twenty-two-year-old George McGovern, who was to become a United States senator and a presidential candidate, flew thirty-five combat missions (all the Army would allow) and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. We meet him and his mates, his co-pilot killed in action, and crews of other planes. Many went down in flames. As “Band of Brothers” and “Citizen Soldiers” portrayed the bravery and ultimate victory of the American soldiers from Normandy on to Germany, “The Wild Blue makes” clear thecontribution these young men of the Army Air Forces stationed in Italy made to the Allied victory.

The Victors

Kim — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:16:41 +0000

From America’s preeminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes a brilliant telling of the war in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945. This authoritative narrative account is drawn by the author himself from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, most particularly from the definitive and comprehensive “D-Day” and “Citizen Soldiers,” about which the great Civil War historian James McPherson wrote, If there is a better book about the experience of GIs who fought in Europe during World War II, I have not read it. “Citizen Soldiers” captures the fear and exhilaration of combat, the hunger and cold and filth of the foxholes, the small intense world of the individual rifleman as well as the big picture of the European theater in a manner that grips the reader and will not let him go. No one who has not been there can understand what combat is like but Stephen Ambrose brings us closer to an understanding than any other historian has done. “The Victors” also includes stories of individual battles, raids, acts of courage and suffering from “Pegasus Bridge,” an account of the first engagement of D-Day, when a detachment of British airborne troops stormed the German defense forces and paved the way for the Allied invasion; and from “Band of Brothers,” an account of an American rifle company from the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment who fought, died, and conquered, from Utah Beach through the Bulge and on to Hitter’s Eagle’s Nest in Germany. Stephen Ambrose is also the author of “Eisenhower,” the greatest work on Dwight Eisenhower, and one of the editors of the Supreme Allied Commander’s papers. He describes themomentous decisions about how and where the war was fought, and about the strategies and conduct of the generals and officers who led the invasion and the bloody drive across Europe to Berlin. But it is, as always with Stephen Ambrose, the ranks, the ordinary boys and men, who command his attention and his awe. “The Victors” tells their stories, how citizens became soldiers in the best army in the world. Ambrose draws on thousands of interviews and oral histories from government and private archives, from the high command Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton — on down through officers and enlisted men, to re-create the last year of the Second World War when the Allied soldiers pushed the Germans out of France, chased them across Germany, and destroyed the Nazi regime.